About

I’ve recently moved to Los Angeles as a USC Presidential Sustainability Fellow. Here I am collaborating with Carly Kenkel and Joe Arvai on research related to coral reef ecology, evolution, and conservation. Previously I was a NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford in the lab of Tim Coulson in the Department of Biology. I received my PhD
in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale University, in the lab of theoretical ecologist David Vasseur. 

I began my path into quantitative ecology and evolutionary biology as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I earned a degree in mathematics, and ecology & evolutionary biology under the mentorship of Holly Barnard and Alexander Cruz. I’m broadly interested in how we manage natural populations, particularly in how we can facilitate persistence alongside factors such as environmental change and habitat loss. In my PhD I came at this from a theoretical modeling perspective. It can be difficult for scientists to collect fine scale data on how populations can evolve to adapt to a changing environment, and the interplay between evolutionary and ecological dynamics, and so I work to create theory to fill those gaps in our understanding.
In my NSF postdoctoral fellowship work at Oxford University, I combined theoretical and experimental methods to specifically investigate the role of changing temperature in species adaptation and extinction. Currently, I take this focus to the field utilizing coral reef data, to assess plasticity and evolution in threatened coral reef systems in the Caribbean.

*Photography by Pam Schulz